A Letter to My White Christian Pro-Life Friends, Part 1: My Story
Dear White Christian Pro-Life Friends,
If you from time to time have second thoughts about what the pro-life movement is doing to our country, our faith, and your own soul, this four-part series is for you. I only ask that you read it prayerfully and thoughtfully, with an open mind and heart. I hope you will feel that I show you and your sincere involvement in the pro-life cause the respect you deserve, and if nothing else, I hope this series will help you participate in the movement more wisely and lovingly going forward.
I'm a family-oriented person, the father of four wonderful adult children in their thirties and the grandfather of five amazing grandkids ten and younger. I've been married to my college sweetheart, Grace, for 41 years. Grace was raised Roman Catholic, and she went to Catholic schools from birth through college. We met through a campus ministry.
I also grew up in a loving Evangelical Christian family in the Plymouth Brethren tradition. My parents were of Scot, Irish, English, and Dutch descent. For me, childhood was enriched by memorizing Bible verses, going to Bible camp in the summer, attending Bible studies, and having a daily quiet time with Bible reading. My whole life has been shaped by Scripture and the rich resources of the Christian tradition, and I am deeply grateful for my heritage.
In my teens, I became part of the Jesus Movement and the charismatic movement. For twenty-four years, I was an Evangelical church planter and pastor, and now I work as an author, speaker, teacher, and activist. I am especially dedicated, because of my faith, to working for the poor, the planet, and peace.
Grace and I were part of the pro-life movement near its founding, and I have many good friends active in the pro-life movement today -- both Evangelical and Catholic, and I hope you will graciously give me the chance to share my story with you.
Because I was born near the peak of the baby boom (1956), I am old enough to remember when conservative Evangelicals didn’t intentionally involve themselves in politics. Back then, we saw involvement in politics as a “worldly” distraction from our only real work in the world before the Rapture: saving souls bound for hell.
I'm also old enough to remember the early 1970’s, when Evangelicals widely supported abortion rights, including well-known Southern Baptists like W. A. Criswell, who believed that Genesis 2:7 definitively answered the question of when human life begins: at the first breath. (Even the Lausanne Covenant of 1974 never mentions abortion. Fifteen years later, the Lausanne movement included it in Article 4 of the Manila Manifesto - where it was mentioned, not to the exclusion of other issues, but as one among many.)
Back then, most Protestants considered abortion a “Catholic issue.” Abortion certainly wasn’t a litmus test for Evangelical orthodoxy.
The first time I heard of abortion wasn't even in church: it was in my senior year of public high school, in a philosophy class. I was assigned "legalizing abortion" as a topic for a research paper on ethics. I don't remember which side I took, or even if I took a side, but I do remember that I felt the issue was complicated, with good points on both sides.
When I became part of the Jesus Movement in the early 70’s, and then was involved with the Charismatic Movement in the mid 70's, I don’t ever remember abortion being mentioned. Not once.
Then I remember how quickly that changed in the late 70’s and early 80’s. For me, it was Francis Schaeffer's and Ron Sider’s writings that won me over to the pro-life cause.
For several years, I attended the annual March for Life with a sign in my hand, my wife by my side, our baby in a backpack, and a toddler or two in a stroller. I felt politically awakened.
I was taking a public stand for something for the first time in my life! Ironically, this didn’t make me feel conservative, because, as I said, all the religious conservatives I knew stayed away from any “secular” or “political” issues.
Marching and carrying signs and attending rallies for a cause I believed in made me feel dangerously liberal!
In the 1980's, as a young father and the pastor of a nondenominational church, I was concerned about the sexualization of children by advertisers and entertainers. I was concerned about the breakdown of healthy families and the prevalence of "latchkey kids." I was concerned about cavalier attitudes that cheapened sex and empowered predatory men. I was concerned about the startling rise in pornography addiction (even before the internet - remember video shops?). I was concerned about a general loss of reverence and respect, a rising tide of sleaze.
Pro-family, pro-life Christians, I knew, cared about these things as well, so I was glad to be counted among them.
But I gradually began to realize that I was being inducted into something bigger and more complex than I had expected.
I hit a “come to Jesus moment” one Sunday morning at the church I co-led. An unmarried woman in our church got pregnant and had an abortion. In our tradition, we followed a process of "church discipline" that was outlined in Mathew 18, and in the end, we removed her from membership. An older woman in our fellowship came up and handed me a folded over piece of paper. She didn't say anything; she just smiled, gave it to me, and walked away. On it she had written these words from another chapter in Matthew (23):
Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees … tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.”
I am sad to say that I was defensive at first, but later, her gentle confrontation broke through and I saw myself in her words. I thought of the Gospel story of the woman caught in adultery (in John 8:1-11), where a woman was publicly shamed by religious leaders while a man got off scot free. I had played the role of the judgmental religious leader, and I felt truly, legitimately ashamed.
My desire to do the right thing had led me to do something that I felt ashamed of.
But I kept marching, reading pro-life literature, and supporting the cause as I was able, even as my misgivings grew. I’ll describe those misgivings in more detail in Part 2.*
* Thanks for reading Part 1. I know how difficult it is to read things that don't fit in with our existing commitments and convictions. Let me just say that I'm grateful to you for reading this far, and I will only be more grateful if you stay with me through all four parts. Again, thank you.
0 Comments9 Minutes
Online Speaking Engagements for Brian D. McLaren
Greetings, friends!
Through June of 2021 (and perhaps beyond), I'll be focusing on online speaking engagements. It's safer in the pandemic and it's better for the environment too.*
If you'd like me to
- be the guest preacher at your church,
- give one or more lectures for a conference,
- lead or speak at an online retreat,
- do a Q & R or lecture and discussion for an online seminary class, reading group, or youth group,
- or in some other way join you in good work that you're doing,
... please contact us here: https://brianmclaren.net/contact/
From January through April of 2021, I'll also be doing an online book tour for my new book, Faith After Doubt. Details TBA.
*Just in case you're interested, I use a carbon offset program (planting trees) for mitigating air travel impact, and I invested travel income in going solar on my home in 2019. I'll continue to do offsetting, whether or not I return to air travel. Next goal: when it comes time to replace my hybrid car (Hyundai Ioniq, highly recommended), I hope to go electric. Here's more on this subject.
0 Comments1 Minutes
Changing the abortion debate
In the coming days, I'll be sharing a four-part letter to my friends who are pro-life, white, and Christian. As background (or a PS), I hope this article I co-wrote with my Catholic colleague Patrick Carolan will be of help to you. It originally appeared in the National Catholic Register, and is available here.
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It's time to change the abortion debate in America
For the last 40 years, the abortion debate, as currently framed, has raised huge sums of money for non-profits and political organizations, especially those on the right. It has also provided leaders of both parties with a simple issue around which to mobilize voters: for Republicans, the rights of the unborn, and for Democrats, the rights of women.
But the conventional debate has a dark side, a set of side effects and unintended consequences that we believe citizens of moral conscience need to know and pay attention to.
For example, each side, by providing us with a short-cut to a sense of moral superiority, also gives us a weapon with which to demonize and even dehumanize our counterparts. When we render our opponents the evil enemy, we risk becoming a house so divided that our nation becomes ungovernable. When one side frames ethically complex issues as simplistic moral absolutes, then negotiation, the heart of politics in a democracy, becomes moral compromise. And when the other side frames abortion as if it were a simple legal and medical matter with no moral dimension, adherents render themselves insensitive and incomprehensible to their counterparts.
We're left with polarization, paralysis and mutual vilification, right at a critical moment when so many other serious problems demand our unified attention: runaway climate change and economic inequality, unchecked gun violence, the need for immigration reform, and a resurgence of racism in its many ugly forms.
That's why more and more of us are waking up to this realization: The current framing of the debate is wounding our nation and may in fact become our undoing, dividing us so deeply that in seeking to win elections, we lose our nation's soul.
As religious leaders, one Catholic and one Protestant, we see the great harm the old abortion debate is doing, both to our national politics and to our religious communities. That's why we would like to invite politicians, religious leaders and citizens in general to turn away from the rhetoric of mutually-assured destruction and reframe the abortion debate in more productive terms for the future.
A "Next Generation Abortion Conversation" would have the following ground rules:
First, we would stop demonizing each other. We would acknowledge how seductive it is for each side to consider itself morally superior and reduce its opponent to the level of moral filth. We would face the harm that kind of pride can do, both politically and spiritually. In our combined 120-plus years of life experience, neither of us has ever met a single supporter of abortion rights who hates babies, supports infanticide, or who has a "the more the better" attitude toward abortion. Nor have we ever met an abortion opponent who hates women and wants to throw mothers in jail for seeking an abortion. No doubt, such extremists may exist, but we have yet to meet any, and we can no longer let the debate be framed and fought from the extremes.
Second, we must acknowledge that there aren't only two positions on abortion. It would be more accurate to say there are five, with purists on either end of the spectrum, and in the middle, three groups that account for the majority of us, those who are against abortion but do not want to criminalize it, those who support abortion rights but who would like to see abortion rates reduced, and those in between who see wisdom (and problems) on both sides. If we get beyond the old two-sides framing, we can drop the old pro-life versus pro-choice binary entirely. The fact is that life and choice are not mutually exclusive, and in a democracy, we can hold our own moral convictions about life and choice, rooted in our religious traditions, without feeling that others should be forced to live by them.
Third, we must shift the debate from making abortion illegal to making abortion less and less necessary. The truth is that we can both reduce abortions and protect vulnerable women from having politicians (who are mostly wealthy, white and male, by the way) interfere with one of their most personal moral decisions. Abortion reduction rather than criminalization is a goal that nearly all of us can agree to.
And there's great news in this regard. We're already succeeding at reducing abortion rates, and we already know what will reduce them even more. If we shift our energies in the direction of abortion reduction, focusing on the causes and conditions that lead to abortion, everyone will benefit.
For 40 years, our nation has been torn apart by one framing of the abortion debate. It's time for a new generation to address the issue in a new and wiser way.
[Patrick Carolan is the Catholic Outreach Director for Vote Common Good. He was executive director of the Franciscan Action Network since 2010 and is a co-founder of the Global Catholic Climate Movement. Brian McLaren is an author, speaker, activist and public theologian. A former college English teacher and evangelical minister, he co-leads the Common Good Messaging Team, part of Vote Common Good.]
0 Comments7 Minutes
Why I’m Talking Politics So Much: It May Not Be What You Think
For some years of my life, I said I hated politics and wanted nothing to do with it.
I said this for an admirable reason and for an unworthy reason.
Admirably, I didn't want to be part of a process of dividing the electorate to gain advantage for one party, winning for "us" to make losers of "them," and throwing truth and decency under the bus for the prize of winning. I suspected then, as I feel even more strongly now, that this kind of winning by division wins elections while rendering the nation ungovernable. My faith taught me that was a deceitful goal, a false value, a pollution of both ends and means. In that sense, I could still say that I hate politics.
But there was also something terribly egocentric about my statement. I wanted to rise above the fray, to take some holier-than-both-sides posture of pristine superiority. Frankly, that was a power play: throw both sides under the bus to leave me alone standing. It was as dirty and despicable as what I was condemning in "politics," maybe more dirty and despicable, because it was careless about the suffering of others and obsessed with my own ego-brand. (Perhaps that's a main reason Trump bothers me so much: in him I see a reflection of my own inner egotistical narcissist.)
I became more political in my last several years in the pastorate. My Christian friends will understand what I mean when I say that I felt "compelled by the Holy Spirit" to do so. In the 1990's, I was disgusted by Bill Clinton's personal decadence, and worried about the effect his bad personal example would have on the electorate. (I believed then, as I do now, that character counts.) Meanwhile, I was seeing, embodied in figures like Newt Gingrich, an increasingly obvious swing toward authoritarianism in the Republican Party. That swing culminated, not just in Donald Trump's election, but in the wholesale submission to the "dear leader" by every single Republican member of Congress (although one or two, like Mitt Romney or Justin Amash, have occasionally uttered a word or two of resistance, and deserve credit for doing so).
I was deeply involved in the first Obama campaign and tried to be involved in the second, although I felt the Democratic Party machinery seemed to have faltered by 2012. In 2016, I felt that faltering even more strongly with the Clinton campaign. But along with many of you, I tried as hard as I could to oppose Trump and all he stood for. And, of course, our side lost.
(Back in the Obama years, a friend in Congress, a Democrat, once told me that Republican machinery successfully unites people around lies, and Democratic machinery fails to unite people around truth. Although I was disappointed in the Democratic Party's ability to mobilize around a fresh, visionary message in 2012 and 2016, I think they're doing better in 2020. There's still a long way to go, especially because the electoral college could require Democrats to win the popular vote by something like 54%.)
In these twenty years of increasing political engagement, despite my frustration with Democratic Party machinery, I have to say that in every single engagement I've had with party activists, I have been impressed, even inspired. These are hard working and sincere people, dedicated to all the values I've preached about for so many years. (And to my pro-life friends, as I've written about at length elsewhere, I have never met a single Democrat who is pro-abortion, in the sense that they want more abortions to happen rather than less. But I have met many Republicans are pro-guns; they don't just want people to have the right to have guns, they want more guns for more people -- or at least, I suspect sometimes, for more white people.)
I feel I need to sharpen this point: In general, I have found more intense sincerity, sacrifice, moral earnestness, and commitment to justice and peace among social and political activists -- people working against racism, people working for environmental protection and regeneration, people working for the poor and vulnerable, people working against political corruption, people working for the common good -- than I have among church-goers. Among too many church-goers (thank God, not all!), what I have found is a desire to consume religious goods and services from their preferred vendor.
Of course, I remain committed to the Christian church in its many forms. But I've been attracted to where I see the most sincerity, sacrifice, moral earnestness, and commitment to justice, peace, and the common good. I see these qualities as the work of the Spirit, and where the Spirit is working (not just being talked and sung about, but working), that's where I want to be. (In case you're wondering, I sense those qualities of genuineness in every single conference call and Zoom meeting I'm on with the Biden campaign, and I've been on a lot lately. And I sense it among the new generation of churches that are rising from the rubble of Christianity's self-immolation in Trumpism.)
But I need to make something clear. I do not believe politics will save us. I think the Republican Party, as currently configured behind a racist authoritarian, will hasten our self-destruction, but I am under no illusion that any political party can save us.
The fact is, I do not see a lot of evidence that our current systems are salvageable. I would be happy to be surprised, but I think the global economy, the oligarchs that run it, and the systems that run them, are currently like a car with no breaks heading for the rim of the Grand Canyon.
So, you might wonder, why do I keep laboring if I don't have confidence that my team will save the day? Here's why: I have made a commitment. To quote one of my favorite songs from my childhood, I have decided to follow Jesus. I am not sustained by the hope of winning or positive signs of hope. I am sustained by my commitment to be the kind of person who lives by compassion and wisdom, love and truth, empathy and connectedness, no matter what, win or lose. I need no promise of a happy ending, short-term or long-term, because my commitment is to a way of life, not a political plan for victory.
That's on my good days. I have to admit, there are bad days when I really wish I had more hope, more optimism, less of a feeling of impending doom. (I hope you don't mind me being this honest.) But then I remember that hope is about expectation and expectations are just resentments and disappointments waiting to happen. (Which is why, all of my fellow Biden/Harris supporters, I think we need to spend some time preparing ourselves spiritually and emotionally for the worst, even as we work our hearts out for the best.)
This, I think, is what Jesus sorted out in the Garden of Gethsemane. He was going to do God's will no matter what, win or lose, succeed or fail, even if it meant shame, humiliation, torture, defeat, and death. You might say, "Yes, but didn't he know about the joy set before him? Didn't he know about resurrection?" Maybe. But maybe Matthew 27:46 (Why have you forsaken me?) tells us that even he wasn't given that confidence. Maybe Jesus's experience was more like that of Shadrach, Meshak, and Abednego in Daniel 3:16-18.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered the king, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to present a defense to you in this matter. If our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the furnace of blazing fire and out of your hand, O king, let him deliver us. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up.
In other words, whatever happens, succeed or fail, we are not bowing our knees to the stupid idol of an egotistical and violent tyrant. We are who we are. We are people shaped by compassion and wisdom, by truth and love, by empathy and connectedness. We can't just go along with this idiocy, even if it's gold-plated.
That's why I'm involved in politics. It's not simply for the love of politics, although I have come to love much about politics. It's for the love of life, the love of truth, the love of neighbor, the love of this precious earth, and in and through them, the love of God.
So, if you're annoyed with me, that's OK. I can imagine times when younger versions of me would have been annoyed with me too. But I hope you'll at least understand why I'm doing what I'm doing. Living by compassion and wisdom, truth and love, empathy and connectedness will be, in the end, our only good option, whatever our party, religion, race, nation, or generation. It's not just who we vote for, as important as that is: it's who we become.
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The Five Electorates in 2020
You may think, as many people do, that there are only two kinds of voters in American politics, Republican and Democrat or Conservative and Liberal. You may even add a third category, Independents.
0 Comments14 Minutes